Cannon Brawl

Game design often involves a lot of experimentation, and some experiments don’t always pan out. And on that note we’ve removed bombardment. It was intended to allow weaker players a small chance of beating more experienced players and feel like they at least made a dent before being beaten. However, more often it felt arbitrary and didn’t achieve its design goals for either player. The cost of keeping it in outweighs its benefits so we’ve removed it.

We’ve also slightly tweaked the bomb bots in order to make them harder to spam with early game, but more viable later in the game.

First, welcome to all the new players who have been trying the demo! Based on recent feedback I did some tuning on the comeback bombardment. The goal of the bombardment is to give you a chance if you made a mistake in the first minute or so of a match, but not be so powerful as to feel cheap later on. These changes hope to better achieve that.

Tuning:

Bombardment gets weaker later in the game

Bombardment takes longer after each time it is used to charge up

Changed bombardment UI to hopefully better indicate that you can aim it

Want to play Cannon Brawl with your friends? We’ve released a free demo so your friends can try it out!

We want to get our multiplayer lobbies bursting with new people so you can always find opponents, whether you’re using our matchmaking system or inviting a friend. That’s why we’ve decided to open up the game for players to try it free.

To celebrate, we’re also putting on a sale this week. If you like what you see, you can get the full game for 40% off!

The free demo allows you to play skirmish games against the AI, unranked multiplayer, and you can accept invites to friend matches from owners of the full game. You’ll get one airship pilot and 5 war machines to try out.

The full game includes much more. It’s got a twenty mission campaign with boss battles, nightmare mode, tons more airship pilots and units to unlock, puzzle levels, and competitive ranked multiplayer.

A demo you say, so why is it called Free-To-Play?A big part of Cannon Brawl is its intense multiplayer matches. We want demo players and owners of the full game to be able to fight each other in unranked multiplayer matches. With steam matchmaking, this ends up being called Free-To-Play. But for Cannon Brawl, you can think of it as a demo. There are no microtransactions or in game purchases. If you like the free demo, you can buy and enjoy the full game like you would with any other demo.

Big update today featuring a whole new mechanic for the game! We've added a new ultimate power that charges up as your buildings take damage and will allow you to comeback from small mistakes early on.

Features

Added a new mechanic: Comeback Bombardment. As you take damage and your buildings are destroyed you can bombardment power, displayed on the top of the screen. When your meter is full you can call in a bombardment on your enemy by pressing space. The enemy buildings nearest your airship will be targeted. This is to prevent small mistakes in the beginning costing you the game and to provide for more dynamic and surprising matches. We will likely be tuning this going forward.

Tweaked random building select to not pick bank and mountain maker so often

We’re really proud of what we’ve accomplished. Cannon Brawl is fun, looks fantastic, and explores new areas of design for strategy games. It’s everything we imagined it would be: full campaign, puzzle levels, and deep and competitive online multiplayer.

We've come a long way from the little prototype I made back in college. It won the Activision Independent Games Competition, which launched me and Theresa’s journey into full time indie game development as Turtle Sandbox. It was selected in the 2012 PAX 10, which helped get our name out there and was the first time we demoed it publicly. We launched our alpha in July of 2013 on Early Access, and today we’re now ready to call it done! Of course, we’ll still be supporting it with future patches and updates.

Huge thanks to everyone who played the Early Access builds, we got a ton of great feedback and it’s made the game better than we ever thought possible. It’s been great to have players who play the game at a higher level than we do and can help balance and tune in ways we couldn't have done on our own.

We’ll be streaming on Twitch from 12pm-8pm PST here: http://www.twitch.tv/cannonbrawlgame. Stop on by to join our celebration of launch day and see some exciting match ups in online multiplayer!

Just before our final launch on September 19th, we've added native Linux support! We want to show our support for the Linux community and want to be part of the movement to bring more games to this beloved platform.

Assuming no new lobby related issues crop up with this build, I’ll be defaulting people to joining the lobby on game start up one week from now in a silent update. Thanks also for reporting all your crash, it helps me get them fixed!

Features/Improvements

UI art pass on the lobby!

Tuning:

Reduced fall damage slightly

Added new land on Lava Desert map to allow better defense of your HQ

Fixes:

Attempt fix for the ‘right click’ join game crash on friend invite lobbies

Fixed bug where a building with over 100hp would not be killed from water damage

Fixed lobby visibility issues with friend invites and leaderboards

Fix for various rare crashes around matchmaking running in the background

Fixed sound bug when taking over an enemy building with a bank with no other targets in range

Fix issue where matchmaking in background would occasionally match a campaign level